One of the main topics that we’ve covered here on this blog over the last couple of years is the relatively rapid, seemingly relentless infiltration of pseudoscience into what should be bastions of science-based medicine (SBM), namely medical schools and academic medical centers promoted by academics who should, but apparently don’t, know better. From the very beginning, we’ve written numerous posts about this infiltration and how it has been facilitated by a variety of factors, including changes in the culture of medical academia and our own culture in general, not to mention a dedicated cadre of ideologues such as the Bravewell Collaboration, whose purpose is to blur the lines between science and pseudoscience and promote the “integration” of quackery into science-based medicine. Certainly promoters of what Dr. Robert W. Donnell termed “quackademic medicine” wouldn’t put it that way, but I would. Indeed, promoters of quackademic medicine scored a major victory last month, when a credulous piece of tripe about acupuncture passing as a review article managed to find its way into the New England Journal Medicine, a misstep that was promptly skewered by Mark Crislip, Steve Novella, and myself. It’s rare for more than two of us to write about the same topic, but it was earned by a mistake as dire as the editors of the NEJM allowing rank pseudoscience to sully its normally science-based pages.

Today, I want to riff a bit on one aspect of this phenomenon. As a cancer surgeon, I’ve dedicated myself to treating patients with cancer and then subspecialized even further, dedicating myself to the surgical treatment of breast cancer. Consequently, the interface of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) in the treatment of cancer both interests and appalls me. The reason for my horror at the application of CAM to cancer patients, as you might expect, is that cancer is a disease that is highly feared and can be highly deadly, depending upon the specific kind of cancer. Cancer patients deserve nothing less than the best science-based evidence that we have to offer, free of pseudoscience. Yet in even the most highly respected cancer centers, such as M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, there are departments or divisions of what is increasingly called “integrative oncology.” The claim behind “integrative oncology” is that it is “integrating the best of science-based and ‘alternative’ medicine,” but in reality all too often it is “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine. I have yet to hear an explanation of how “integrating” pseudoscience or nonscience into science-based oncology benefits cancer patients, but, then, that’s probably just the nasty old reductionist in me. Let’s find out.(more…)

Homeopathy is having a bad year. From a scientific point of view, it has had a couple of bad centuries. The progress of our scientific understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics has failed to confirm any of the core beliefs of homeopathy. Like does not cure like (this is a form of superstition known as sympathetic magic, with no basis in science). Diluting substances does not make them stronger – a notion that violates the chemical law of mass action and the laws of thermodynamics. And countless clinical studies have shown that homeopathic preparations are nothing more than placebos. That homeopathy cannot work and does not work is settled science, as much as it is possible for science to be settled.

Despite the science, homeopathy has persevered through a combination of cultural inertia and political support. But in the last year there are signs that this trend may be reversing. In the UK The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, in which they conclude that homeopathy is failed science and should be completely abandoned – no further support in the NHS and no further research.

NB: I posted this on Health Care Renewal a couple of days ago, figuring that Dr. Gorski’s post would suffice for the SBM readership (he and I had discussed the topic while at TAM8 last week). But Managing Editor Gorski has asked me to repost it here, which I’m happy to do. I am especially pleased to demonstrate that I am capable of writing a shorter post than is Dr. Gorski.

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On July 7, President Obama appointed Dr. Donald Berwick as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Dr. Berwick, a pediatrician, is well known as the CEO of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), which “exists to close the enormous gap between the health care we have and the health care we should have — a gap so large in the US that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2001 called it a ‘quality chasm’.” Dr. Berwick was one of the authors of that IOM report. His IHI has been a major player in the patient safety movement, most notably with its “100,000 Lives Campaign” and, more recently, its “5 Million Lives Campaign.”

Berwick’s CMS gig is a “recess appointment”: it was made during the Senate’s July 4th recess period, without a formal confirmation hearing—although such a hearing must take place before the end of this Senate term, if he is to remain in the position. A recent story suggested that Obama had made the recess appointment in order to avoid a reprise of “last year’s divisive health care debate.” The president had originally nominated Berwick for the position in April, and Republicans have opposed “Berwick’s views on rationing of care,” claiming that he “would deny needed care based on cost.”

A “Patient-Centered Extremist”

If there is a problem with the appointment, it is likely to be roughly the opposite of what Republicans might suppose: Dr. Berwick is a self-described “Patient-Centered Extremist.” He favors letting patients have the last word in decisions about their care even if that means, for example, choosing to have unnecessary and expensive hi-tech studies. In an article for Health Affairs published about a year ago, he explicitly argued against the “professionally dominant view of quality of health care”:

On “wholistic” medicine

If there’s one aspect of so-called “alternative medicine” and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is that its practitioners tout as being a huge advantage over what they often refer to sneeringly as “conventional” or “scientific” medicine is that — or so its practitioners claim — alt-med treats the “whole patient,” that it’s “wholistic” in a way that the evil reductionist “Western” science-based medicine can’t be. Supposedly, we reductionistic, unimaginative physicians only focus on disease and ignore the “whole patient.” Of course, to me this claim is belied by the hectoring to which my own primary care physician has subjected me about my horrible diet and lack of exercise on pretty much every visit I’ve had with her, but then maybe she’s an anomaly, along with Dr. Lipson on this very blog and pretty much every other primary care doctor I’ve ever dealt with. Anecdotal experience, I know, but since alt-med mavens appear to value anecdotal evidence above pretty much all else I thought it appropriate to mention here. Also belying the claim of alt-med practitioners that they “individualize” treatments to their patients in a way that science-based medicine does not is the maddening tendency of various alt-med modalities to settle on just One True Cause of All Disease, be it liver flukes as the One True Cause of Cancer, heavy metal toxicity as the One True Cause of cancer, autism, and various other diseases, or “allergies,” acid, or obstruction of the flow of qi as the One True Cause of All Disease.

Given the claim of “wholism” that is such an advertising gimmick among many of the varieties of woo, I’m always interested when I see evidence that alt-med is imitating its envied and disliked reductionistic competition. True, this is nothing new, given how alt-med has tried to seek legitimacy by taking on the mantle of science-based medicine wherever it can. Examples include the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), various organizations that try to confer legitimacy to pseudoscience by providing “certification” in various flavors of woo, and moves to push state medical boards to go further than that and confer legally protected status to practitioners by actually licensing them. This latter tactic has been very successful in that many states now license acupuncturists, while some states even license naturopaths and “homeopathic physicians,” the latter of which I find quite amusing because the term perfectly encapsulates what must remain of such a physician’s medical training after being diluted to 30C with woo. The only difference is that, unlike what is claimed with homeopathy, diluting MD medical knowledge with woo does not make it stronger. In terms of naturopathy, though, one of the most alarming aspects of the infiltration of naturopaths into the health care system is that some states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada are seriously considering allowing them to prescribe real pharmaceutical medications, even though they lack the training and knowledge to use such drugs safely.

Imagine my combination of bemusement and alarm, then, when I learned of a new specialty of pseudoscience, namely the field of naturopathic oncology.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. (I know I was when I first encountered this specialty.)(more…)

On April 2, Steve Novella, Kimball Atwood, and I visited the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to meet with its director, Dr. Josephine Briggs. I’m not going to rehash what was said because we agreed that Steve would handle that task, and he did so admirably last week. I agree with Steve that it was encouraging that Dr. Briggs apparently reads this blog and shares many of our concerns about NCCAM, the poor science that it has funded, and its use by promoters of unscientific medicine to promote their quackery. Most heartening of all was that she appeared to recognize how much CAM is infused with anti-vaccine beliefs and, worse, the promotion of these beliefs to the detriment of public health.

Those positive reactions to what was a friendly but frank exchange of views notwithstanding, as we were sitting in a conference room next to Dr. Briggs’ office, I couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction of CAM promoters would be when they found out about this meeting. Now I know. John Weeks over at The Integrator Blog is not happy:

Novella’s posting reads like a Fox News interview: 95% his team’s point, then a brief NCCAM response. That Briggs asked for the meeting likely grew out of an early March conference at Yale at which Novella and she both participated. For this, she deserves the Barack Obama Big Tent award for her proven interest in sitting down with everyone, no matter which party affiliation or belief. (Some have said this was proven in early 2008 when Briggs met with me.) Arguably, Briggs takes her openness to dialogue further than the President. While Obama has kept arms length from leaders who call for the demise of the United States, Briggs has now met with those who have been lobbing bombs at her professional home for years, calling steadily for NCCAM’s destruction.

Because our previous calls for the closing of a relatively small government institute because we view it as a poor use of taxpayer money is just like calling for the downfall of the United States government. Weeks clearly likes ridiculously overblown hyperbole. Interestingly enough, what appeared to upset Mr. Weeks the most was our discussion of homeopathy with Dr. Briggs. As Steve put it:(more…)

Homeopathy is magical thinking, far more religious or superstitious in nature than medical or scientific. And this form of magical thinking can lead people people to eschew effective medical therapy, with tragic results.

Today, April 10, is the first day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), or, as I like to call it, World Sympathetic Magic Awareness Week. This week long “celebration” runs from today until April 16. Now, given the dim view of homeopathy which, I daresay, each and every blogger here at SBM shares, you’d think I wouldn’t want people to pay attention to WHAW. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is because I view homeopathy as nothing more than quackery based on magical thinking that I actually want people to be aware of it, starting with some of the more amusing bits that homeopaths have published over the last year. Like this bit:

Which Steve discussed here, and Orac had some fun with here. (Steve’s deconstruction of Benneth’s nonsense brought responses calling him a hypocrite, a Nazi or a “slave breaker.”)

You may recall that Steve has been criticizing a certain homeopath named John Benneth for his incredible flights of–shall we say?–fancy used in defending homeopathy. As a result, Mr. Benneth (whose website is called The Science of Homeopathy) has produced a series of amazing videos that he’s posted on YouTube. Although we have a very serious mission here at SBM, we are not without a sense of humor, and that’s why we thought our readers might be interested in the sorts of commentary we have received in response to some of our efforts. The first video is called HOMEOPATHY: Jew of Nazi Medicine:

Note how Benneth likens the criticism of his pseudoscience to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. When you see something like this, you know that Godwin’s Law has been thoroughly invoked. The second video is just as outrageous and probably NSFW given that it drops the N-word. Don’t play it if that offends you. You have been warned:(more…)

For a number of reasons, well-argued many times here on SBM, it would be beneficial to American citizens if the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were abolished. This does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Here, then, are my suggestions for making the Center less dangerous and less of a marketing tool for pseudomedicine than it has been since its inception. Some suggestions might even make the Center somewhat useful. They are listed in order of priority. The Center should:

1. Abandon all unethical trials, beginning with the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT, which is under the joint auspices of the NHLBI). This should be done in a very public manner. The reasons for abandoning the TACT, in summary, are as follows.